


Fallow Waters

by moonvapour



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: No Powers, Arcades, British Seaside Arcade AU, F/F, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Pre-Relationship, Seaside, listen. it's niche But It Had To Be Done
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:53:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24025390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonvapour/pseuds/moonvapour
Summary: After the fishing boat had sunk and the last of her family with it, Isabela bought an arcade on the seafront.
Relationships: Isabela/Merrill (Dragon Age)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Fallow Waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anotetofollow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anotetofollow/gifts).



> blatantly and painfully plotless fluff written for my very excellent and wonderful and brilliant friend anotetofollow. i miss you and this lockdown sucks and i miss Cleethorpes and i hope you enjoy!!!
> 
> you can read her Mass Effect f!shali companion piece [here!!!!!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24181828)

After the fishing boat had sunk and her family with it, Isabela had claimed the insurance money and then gone to university. It had seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It’d give her space to think, to breathe. She’d come back for the funerals and then gone away again. She liked the city, liked the busyness of it, but when her degree was over and she’d found herself looking for graduate jobs, sensible jobs, she’d thought of the empty house back home near the coast and the bank account full of insurance money she was yet to touch and then thought _ah, fuck it_.

The arcade was dilapidated; little more than breeze blocks with a metal roof and an office and a tiny kitchenette. It came with the arcade machines, but half of them had been broken, and the first month had included looking at websites on her phone to see if she could work out how to begin to fix them. But it was on the promenade, the opposite side of the road, a high wall that had steps that led down to the beach, and while Isabela couldn’t follow the family in owning a ship, the cynic and romantic in her liked to think this came close.

The first summer had been the hardest. The weather had been against her, lashing rain against the closed shutters; the way the sea had surged dangerously close to the edge of the stone wall; the way she hadn’t yet scraped together the money for the insurance, because the insurance knew being only a few feet from the shore was a risk, especially at high tide. The corrugated metal of the roof had broken in and destroyed half a dozen arcade machines, and she had filed the business forms wrong, and she had half a mind to pack it in and start over again.

But she hadn’t. That winter was spent doing other things, other jobs, crying on the shoulder of the woman who ran the chippie a few buildings down who always had a kind word for her. She introduced Isabela to other businesses, other owners, and there was a community here that she hadn’t expected. A bloke with a blowtorch and a wink had fixed the roof for her at a rate so cheap it was a rip off, but Isabela could only find it in her to be grateful, and she went home and sat in her shower and wept at the relief of it. Over New Year she had enlisted Hawke and Fenris and half a dozen other friends from university to stack all the arcade machines into the middle of the building and paint the walls over three days, and on the fourth they woke up the next morning still drunk, and Isabela realised she had a home here. A life here.

That spring had been better, ripe and warm, and she opened the shutters over the Easter holiday and sat behind the little bulletproof glass in the little yellow kiosk and a group of teenagers, silly, laughing, had come in to push coins into slots. The cry when they won a tiny rubber duck made her triumphant. Every day for the next week a gang of eight year olds had been waiting outside on BMX bikes, jangling with one and two penny coins, expectant and she had thought _oh thank fuck._

She was three summers in, now, approaching her fourth, and it was easier every day. Her friends dropped in and out, sometimes staying for hours, sometimes weeks. Hawke came and went as he would, staying for the entire winter, usually, where they’d sit in greasy spoons and cheap little coffee shops together and he would tell her of his adventures. She found herself longing for something similar, although she could never quite find the money to scrape together for a holiday. She wondered, sometimes, how fast her fisherman grandfather was turning in his grave at the thought of his last, youngest, surviving grandchild not ever going out to sea. If part of the reason she never scraped the money together was because she was scared of never coming back, at least she had no-one but herself to admit that to.

She had the money, now, to hire a girl from the local college looking for summer work, and had security cameras, just in case. She had a security guard on call for the busy days, when the trains would come in packed and the sun would blaze down and the queues for fish and chips and drinks were long enough to almost go around the block. More often than not she manned the little kiosk herself. It was easy work, lazy work, to exchange crumpled notes for coins and look down condescendingly at children that insisted that they deserved the twenty pound plush toy, only that the claw machine _just_ hadn’t picked it up in time, _really_.

Everything changed again the day Hawke reappeared because he was a bastard like that. He had appeared in his car on her house’s driveway on the hottest day of the year, and Isabela let herself in after a long shift to find the house already alive with noise and music. They were sat in the kitchen, Hawke and the girl, and he was cooking something disastrously on the hob, telling an outlandish story, and the girl was sat at the table and laughing. “Isabela!” he crowed, and drew her in for a hug. “The woman of the hour!”

Even when Isabela was cross at him, she wouldn’t allow herself to not hug him. “Hawke,” she said, and then drew apart to examine what he was cooking in her frying pan. “What are you burning?”

Hawke made a noise of great offence, but he was laughing. “I’m not burning anything,” he proclaimed. “Anyway, you’ve got more things to worry about. Isabela, this is Merrill. Merrill: Isabela, who I was telling you about.”

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Hawke _could_ be trusted to cook, at least a little. Isabela left him to it. She sank down into the seat at the kitchen table.

“Lovely to meet you,” Merrill said. She was Welsh. Her face was clear, tattoos like dark swirls running across her high forehead and cheeks. If Isabela was cruel, she might have said she was _plain_. “Sorry about… all this. Hawke insisted it was okay for us to… arrive.”

Isabela made a face. “He has a key, so I suppose I must have agreed to it.” Her tone was bone-dry. “How has he enlisted you, then?”

Merrill laughed. The sound was clear and high. Isabela could feel it; the burgeoning sense of _oh no, she’s cute_. “A poetry meeting,” she said, “if you can believe it.”

“Hawke, reading poetry?” Isabela leaned forward in her seat. “You’ll _have_ to tell me more about that.”

Despite the fact Hawke had just _appeared_ , Isabela found herself liking Merrill. She was sweet, and quick-witted, and although she was a little naive, she was so sarcastic that sometimes even Hawke seemed to miss it. Hawke had brought alcohol, too, because he knew the way to ply Isabela into something she didn’t really want to do. When Merrill was half-asleep on the big sofa in the living room he brought Isabela to the kitchen, drunk, verbose with it, waving a hand.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” she said, cutting him off before he could even begin, “and yeah, alright, I’ll take her for as long as she wants to stay.” Despite herself, she trusted Hawke, and Merrill seemed sweet and was pretty and needed a place to stay. “It’s not like I’m lacking the space.”

Hawke’s expression was so pathetically grateful that Isabela felt uncomfortable just looking at it. Before he could do anything quite as pathetic as _thank her_ , she cut in. “But you’re getting us breakfast tomorrow,” she said. “Lots of it.”

  
  


Breakfast was down at a greasy spoon on the shore front. The place was old, yellowing tiles and a bar top of steel, the prices above the head of the woman at the till. After Hawke ordered three big full English breakfasts and coffee they slumped into one of the booths by the window, Merrill closest to the window, Isabela opposite, Hawke typing away furiously at his phone.

Merrill’s eyes were huge and dark and wide as she stared out at the sea, nose almost pressing to the glass. She probably grew up isolated, if Isabela’s gut feeling was right. Probably rurally. 

The day was a blustery, gusty one, but that was still good pickings for the arcade. Afternoons like this brought in families: divorced fathers with children too young and too distant to know what to do with; elderly couples who brought their own coins and laughed just as loud as anyone else when they won a little plastic figurine. 

“So,” Isabela said, “what do you think?” It was her home town, run-down and dilapidated, a real shithole, all things considered. But the ocean was tantalizing on the worst of days, rolling and lurching, high tide with the water so close, the cockles and the sea shells; the tankers like figurines in the distance. And when the days got bright, the houses seemed to glow with something that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Merrill lit up. “I _love_ it,” she said. “Do you get to stay here all year around?”

“I own an arcade further down the road,” Isabela said, and she thumbed vaguely in the direction of her shack. She was proud of her shack, now with a little office and a laptop and a filing cabinet. “I work the summers and tend to spend the winters loitering. Sometimes this bastard visits.” She kicked out under the table. Hawke looked up from his phone to shoot her a hurt glare, but a playful one.

Merrill laughed, covering her mouth, but she looked near-delighted at the appearance of breakfast, and asked about the best amount of sauce to add, whether to add milk or sugar or both to her instant coffee.

Once they were appropriately greased, they took the walk down to the arcade. Isabela brought them through the back, disabling the burglar alarm, flicking on the lights, turning the plug on that hooked up to the machines. They came on all at once, a discordant mess of noise, and the lights flickered to life. Hawke was eager, stealing a row of 2p coins from the kiosk with a wink, showing Merrill how to slip them in at the perfect time to make the most fall out of the little pot at the bottom. When Isabela glanced into mirrors on the wall, strategically on walls to make the place seem bigger, she could see the way Merrill watched her even as Hawke eagerly explained what to do.

She hid a smile to herself and got on with the chores that needed doing: hoovering, and making tea, and pottering about, and she lifted the shutters to find a group of kids eating rock candy across the road, trying not to seem too eager as they tripped their way inside. Then there was a phone call from someone who supplied the little trinkets she put into the machine, and then a supplier showing up with her near-daily restock of petty cash, and someone who exchanged the money in the little automatic machine for when she wasn't at her kiosk.

When Isabela came back to herself Hawke and Merrill were gone, a text on her phone saying they’d gone to find more food. Isabela locked up her kiosk and took a wander around the premises. Apart from a woman with a buggy, the place was empty, and she leaned on the outside wall and watched as people wandered up and down the promenade. The pier was busy, but it always was busy, and the other people who owned small businesses hated them a little bit for it. 

“Isabela!” Hawke called. She turned to see them walking together, Merrill eating a 99 Flake eagerly, Hawke cradling two more in his hands. Hawke was taller by far, but it was Merrill who drew Isabela’s gaze. “Here,” he said, holding an ice cream out for her.

She wasn’t sure that she wanted it after breakfast, but she took it all the same. The ice cream was rich and cool; the sort of freshness that only whipped ice cream could manage. “Thanks,” she said.

Hawke got a call. He was like that: always getting calls, busier than the rest of them combined. He winked, then stepped across the road to take it, curling his shoulder to his ear, eating the ice cream inelegantly. She could only catch the sound of his voice, none of his words. She tossed the coat, then munched on the flake itself, the two of them in comfortable silence.

Isabela glanced down at Merrill. “You’ve got a little ice cream on your nose, kitten,” she said. Then, a second later, realised what she’d said.

But Merrill didn’t look awkward or uncomfortable or even the slightest bit pink. She just grinned, bright and true. “Thanks.” She wiped it off with the side of her hand, crunching through the last of the cone, tossing the paper covering into the nearest bin. “He’s a little useless, isn’t he?”

Isabela laughed. “Just a little. He’s told you, then?”

“That I can stay? Yeah.”

Isabela glanced out beyond Hawke to stare at the ocean. Sunlight fluttered down from between patchy clouds, and where it landed, the water seemed to glow. “Are you going to, kitten?”

Merrill’s smile was in her voice. “Well, it seems you’ve got something awfully nice set up here. How long can I stay?”

Isabela looked down at her. She smiled. “As long as you’d like.”

“I’d have to earn my keep?” Her expression was teasing, sweet, eyes big and wide. Flirting.

Isabela hummed, looking thoughtful, the corner of her mouth twitching; her heart fluttering just a little. “We can work up to that.”

“Well,” Merrill said, and she offered out her hand. Isabela took it. Her firm grip was smooth and dry. “To a business partnership.”

Isabela’s lips twitched, but she shook hands firmly. “To a business partnership.”

And then Merrill’s hand was on her collar, tugging her down, and her mouth was quick and hot and warm on Isabela’s cheek, a gust of breath, a kiss, no more. Her grin was bright and huge. “And maybe,” she said, composed in the wake of Isabela’s fluster, “to more.”


End file.
